My dear friend Christy Howard is on the #BLOG365 adventure with me and also doing Museum Monday posts. I have been bad about checking out the posts from my fellow bloggers lately, but today I headed over to her page to gain some writing inspiration. This week her Museum Monday post was about William the hippo, the unofficial mascot of the Met Museum. She ended her post with a reference to a post from #MetKidsBlog and these three sentences:

Artifacts naturally prompt questions. 

Questions create learning.

Learning opens doors.

That second sentence caught my attention. I have been rereading Making Thinking Visible and the authors write about thinking moves like wondering and asking questions.

I remember the days when my son was small and most of our interactions during the day involved his questions and observations. Now that he is in middle school the questions from him are fewer and fewer. Maybe he doesn’t feel the need to ask mom when he can just Google an answer, maybe some of his curiosity is dwindling as he grows older, maybe he is wondering and questioning, but doesn’t always feel the need to voice those thoughts.

I have to do a better job of encouraging curiosity at home and modeling authentic questioning. I generally have an interest in almost anything and I question a lot, but I don’t know that he knows that.

It’s the same thing for teachers. Do our students know that we question just as much as they do and do they see the connection between that questioning and learning? How are we promoting curiosity in the classroom and are we making sure it is not surface level inquiry? What routines do we have in place to make this a part of our daily practice? Do they understand that questioning is a lifelong process?

There is always a big push for creating learning conditions in the classroom and Christy’s comment reminded me that questions create learning.